“Here am I, the wretched city, my citizens dead. You who pass me by, bewail my fate and shed a tear.” — Attributed to an anonymous Arabic poet of the sixth century C.E.
After the gargantuan Austrian spectacle of Sodom und Gomorrha in 1922, the sin cities as cinematic locale next occurred in 1932, in a film now apparently lost. No one seems to recall The Sacrifice of Isaac, although the New York Times headlined shortly before its scheduled premiere in Manhattan: “Yiddish Talking Picture On View Here Tuesday.” The article names the film as “the first Yiddish talking picture, in which the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is also found.” That is the only hint I’ve discovered, after obsessive searching, of an S&G connection with this film.
The Times writer adds, in press-release prose, that “a cast of 10,000 persons was used in producing the biblical drama and included in this group is a symphony orchestra of 100 musicians and a chorus of 500 voices. Principal roles will be played by S. Gertenzang as Isaac; F. Adler, Sam Gertler, Dave Yonover and Max Friedlander. The film is said to contain impressive mass sequences and songs that are practically legendary to the present-day public. Mr. and Mrs. A. Gartner, stars of the production, will be at the theatre in person during the run.”
Adolph Gartner is listed on IMDb as director of The Sacrifice of Isaac. No further information is given. Of the other cast members named in the Times article, only Sam Gertler and Max Friedlander appear on IMDb, although neither of them is credited as players in the film.
Eric Goldman, in his 1980 book A World History of the Yiddish Cinema, makes no mention of The Sacrifice of Isaac. J. Hoberman, in Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, has only this to say: “Chicago-based Yiddish actor-impresario Adolph Gartner had ballyhooed something called Joseph and His Brethren as ‘the first Jewish talking picture in the world.’ There is no record of this movie being shown in New York, but two and a half years later, in the fall of 1932, Gartner and his wife Jennie were barnstorming midwestern cities with another film (in which they starred), The Sacrifice of Isaac, ‘The First Yiddish Biblical Talkie Picture Produced.’ ” 1
It was in Rochester, New York, not Hollywood, that the first American film was made on the subject of Sodom and Gomorrah. This was Lot in Sodom, an independent short made in 1933, with a running time of twenty-seven minutes. This fey and affected visual poem — a minor epic of sorts, although for its makers more endgame than forecast — has gained both cult and classic status in recent years. The experimental filmmakers who produced Lot in Sodom, James Sibley Watson, Jr. (1894-1982) and Melville Webber (1871-1947) came late to filmmaking and departed soon after. Their combined output runs for less than one hour, the longest of their works being Lot in Sodom.
Watson, an heir to Western Union money, was born in New York. At Harvard, he made friends with the poet E.E. Cummings. In later years Watson and his wife, Hildegarde — who appears as Lot’s wife in the film — became enthusiastic supporters of Cummings and other modernist poets, including Marianne Moore. (In 1916, Cummings was an usher at the Watsons’ wedding.) Not content with a leisured life, Watson earned a medical degree, although philanthropy and the arts, rather than medicine, seem to have commanded his attention. In 1920 he purchased The Dial, an influential literary magazine that continued publication until 1929. Under Watson and his editor, Schofield Thayer, The Dial published T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” as well as works by Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound. The editors also published art by Van Gogh, Renoir, Matisse, Edvard Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, and many others. If no record of modernism existed elsewhere, much could be extrapolated from The Dial.
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In the late twenties, Watson became interested in the artistic possibilities of film, and in 1928 he and Melville Webber collaborated on The Fall of the House of Usher, an elliptical thirteen-minute variation on the story by Poe. They worked on a second short film — this one an odd seven-minute scrap called Tomato’s Another Day -- in 1930, ending their collaboration and their respective film work three years later with Lot in Sodom. (All three works can be seen on youtube.com.)
Writing in 1975, Watson recalled that “Melville Webber and I started to work on our first entertainment film in the winter of 1926-27. Melville was scenarist, idea man, scene painter, costume designer, make-up man, director, and also played the part of The Visitor [in The Fall of the House of Usher]. My part was cranking the camera, lighting the sets and the actors, developing, printing, splicing, and projecting the film. None of us had any experience with professional film production, least of all myself.” 2
They had made impressive progress by 1933, when they filmed Lot in Sodom. Although the final Watson and Webber collaboration is self-consciously and no doubt intentionally “artistic,” it exceeds much Hollywood product of the time in technical virtuosity. And it’s certainly more daring, with male and female nudity that even pre-code studio pictures didn’t risk. The film opens literally in the clouds above Sodom, followed by an early instance of a split screen image. This one is bisected by a stylized vertical lightning flash akin to the most aggressive Op Art. That flash is so jagged and vibrant that it can trigger an ocular migraine in the susceptible.
The first location shot is from high above, an angel’s-eye view of Sodom. Using a scale model walled village with a towering temple in the center, Watson and Webber minimized the town that Michael Curtiz, and later filmmakers, couldn’t resist inflating. Does the temple honor Yahweh or Sodom’s deities? Impossible to tell, for the film now takes on the lineaments of a dream: a balletic, cubistic, expressionistic, phallic dream.
Avant garde and oneiric, the film simultaneously follows and fragments the familiar plot. Young barechested male dancers perform a stylized ballet orgy in a steamy space like a bath house. This cavorting, of course, represents “wickedness,” although with a
wink of approval. The dancers, added to the other cast members, total about two dozen. That number, along with high-gloss production values, sets Lot in Sodom apart from the usual happy-hands-at-home experimental film.
Not everyone is beautiful at the ballet: some of the dancers are hairy and goatlike. The real old goat, however, is Lot, who starts out a dreary puritan spoilsport chanting psalms while everyone else in town is having a pagan good time. Then Lot’s wife appears in Martha Graham costume. Her movements also derive from Graham, though her look is fashionably Egyptian.
When the beautiful black-hooded angel appears, the boys dance around him in a frenzy. Word spreads that he’s quite a looker, and from that point men fill the street outside Lot’s house. (Lot in Sodom shows the marked influence of The Blood of a Poet. Ironically, this gayish experiment made by heterosexuals is more homoerotic than Cocteau’s film.)
Lot offers his daughter to the mob; they howl with laughter. Then Lot himself takes a look at the daughter, who strips for her father. He pants with lust. When a big snake writhes seductively across the screen, it’s the start of a game of hide-and-symbol. Time-lapse passion flowers begin to blossom. They keep on opening — imagery perhaps borrowed from Georgia O’Keeffe's paintings — until the screen fills with enough vaginal symbols to start not a monologue but a colloquium.
Spring water trickling over a pair of hands announces that Lot’s daughter’s water has broken; and a newborn babe appears. Lot beams and dotes on his — child, or grandchild? In a clever swerve from the Bible story, there’s a hint that the angel might have fathered the infant. Another swerve: one angel comes to town, not two. He commands Lot’s family to leave Sodom. Lot and his daughter rush out arm in arm — where is the baby? — while the wife dawdles. Only later does she follow at a distance as flames lap the city from below and brimstone strikes from above. Lot’s wife makes her final Martha Graham movements as she turns into a salty phallic menhir.
In 2000, Watson and Webber’s insignificant The Fall of the House of Usher was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. This choice is ironic, though not surprising. A look at the list of feature films, documentaries, and newsreels chosen for the list since its establishment in 1989 suggests that safety, rather than aesthetics, comes first. And a picture like Lot in Sodom might infuriate the ghost of Jesse Helms if it goes thumping around Foggy Bottom late at night. That’s because this subversive little film not only glamorizes the Sodomites, it also doesn’t kiss anyone’s holy book. In D.C., failure to kiss the right spot is the real sin. To survive in U.S. politics, you’d better have versatile lips — and a bundle of bribe cash.
Hoberman, Bridge of Light, p. 183
"The Films of J.S. Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber: Some Retrospective Views," The University of Rochester Library Bulletin, Vol. XXVIII, Number 2, Winter 1975. Also online at www.lib.rochester.edu/index